My
mother-in-law has a story about taking my brother-in-law to
the doctor’s office when he was a toddler: He pointed to an
African-American man who entered and said “What’s that!” Very
calmly, she replied “That’s a man.” And left it at that.

Most people I know would aspire to such a reaction. I certainly
did when I first heard the story. Beyond the unequivocal and
inarguable message that we are all people despite our skin
color, her response even managed to carry echoes of the “I
am a man” signs from the big civil rights march on Washington,
D.C.

It’s interesting, and perhaps in retrospect a little odd,
that while I have participated in enough anti-racism work
to be deeply suspicious of any adult professing “color-blindness,”
on account of it usually stands for “systemic-discrimination-blindness,”
I was fully bought in to the idea that mentioning race to
young children is bad, or at best unnecessary, especially
if they encounter racial diversity as part of their normal
lives.

Enter Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, authors of the new book
NurtureShock, whose ambitious and highly necessary
goal is to look at the important messages about parenting/teaching
that the slow accretion of scientific research is showing
that are in direct contradiction to current conventional wisdom.
In a Newsweek article (“See Baby Discriminate,” Sept.
14, 2009) based on a chapter of the book, they examine what
extensive research into children’s development and experiences
in school settings of more-or-less racial diversity have to
say about this idea.

To summarize, the color-blind parenting approach backfires.
The argument goes like this: People, especially children,
are predisposed to sort people into groups, and then to identify
with and assign better attributes to their own groups. They
are not naturally racist, they are naturally identity seeking.
Randomly assigned T-shirt colors, with no other mention or
use made of the categories, will do the same thing. (This
reminds me of the story about the little boy with a lawyer
mother, who said he didn’t want to be a lawyer when he grew
up because “that’s women’s work.”)

Skin color, for all that it doesn’t mean much genetically,
is a very visible marker by which to sort, and it seems that
kids do so without prompting. When we refuse to talk about
it, we make it a taboo subject, and we can’t counterbalance
the inclinations they are forming. According to some studies,
we even risk giving them the impression that we don’t
like people of other races. Without explicit conversations
about race that they can use to understand and balance what
they are seeing, kids flounder and settle into in-group preferences
and self-segregation, which of course existing stereotypes
and cultural assumptions and adult social segregation make
easy. From there, developing a sense of real “otherness” gathers
steam.

One scary statistic is that kids in more diverse schools are
less likely to have a friend of a different race. (Note:
This doesn’t mean desegregation is a bad goal—it’s just not
enough.)

One of the studies Bronson and Merryman discuss shows that
generic, “multicultural,” we’re-all-equal messages don’t make
much of difference on kids’ racial attitudes. The good news
is that something as simple as acknowledging skin color differences
explicitly and talking about how people of different races
have a lot in common and can make good friends can have a
marked difference. Just as we would casually talk with our
children about their observations about different genders,
hair colors, or family structures, and how little those differences
actually mean, we need to get comfortable doing the same with
race.

It’s not easy. I’ve taken a first few dives with my three-year-old,
not going much farther than opening up the topic of different
skin colors among people we know so it’s not an untouchable
subject. Recently, as we read one of her current library books,
My Family Makes Music, on the “my father plays cello
in a string quartet” page, she asked which musician was our
protagonist’s dad. I explained what a cello was and how to
tell it from violins and violas. And then I took a deep breath
and noted that it was also a clue that he was the only musician
in the picture who had brown skin like her, and said that
often, though not always (examples given), a kid will
have a skin color like their parents’. I have also stopped
trying to correct her when she assigns her black doll to represent
her black friend and a white one for herself.

It is surprising how uncomfortable, nay even wrong, these
things feel to do (and even to admit doing). I’m not alone—in
one study of how these things affected racial attitudes (conclusion:
a lot, for the better), five white parents dropped out just
because they were asked to have similar conversations with
their kids.

The conversations I’ve had with my daughter have generated
no particular revelations of unknown in-group thinking harbored
quietly in the back of her brain, but neither have they seemed
to bother her or lead to an increased focus on race. For now,
I guess I’ll figure this is as it should be and work on keeping
my own topic-of-race-avoidance in check.